Director Product Design & PLM

The challenges for a
Director Product Design & PLM
working in
Automotive - Commercial Vehicles
include ...

Lowering the cost of quality

Reducing waste and costs

Managing complexity

Sub-optimal productivity

Lowering the cost of quality

With ever increasing complexity and variability, manufacturers must find new ways to enable and overlay quality controls without increasing costs or process waste.

The high-value manufacturing industry is undergoing unprecedented change, driven by consumer choice and the growing demand for built-to-order products. Driven by transformative digital technologies, the factory of the future will need to be flexible, standardised and efficient to maintain or grow competitive advantage.

The need to minimise cost of quality is a fundamental challenge since quality issues arise across the manufacturing value-chain, including:

Inability of workers to rapidly switch between work packages driven by product complexity and variability

Inability to implement reliable audit and compliance processes

Bottlenecks and congestion causing quality and throughput issues

Managing complexity

Competition for market share is driving an ever greater need to offer consumer choice and build-to-order products. In so doing manufacturers must quickly adapt to the variability and complexity this drives in both product design and process execution.

For manufacturers that are reliant on large labour forces to manage significant levels of inventory, asset and WIP movement, the challenge is further compounded and manifests itself in production issues across the value-chain, including

Lack of situational awareness required to coordinate complex production flows

Inability to adapt and re-plan against errors in real-world delivery status

Cost and complexity of maintaining multiple disparate systems

Realisation of Industry 4.0 strategy limited by an inability to optimise the system rather than the silos

Proliferation of multiple functionally similar systems

Sub-optimal productivity

High-value manufacturing with complex moving processes presents many productivity challenges for manufacturing OEMs. The movement of inventory, tools and assets is tightly tied to production planning and delivery schedules, so much so that deviations from plan can result in significant downtime, reduced productivity and order-to-delivery delays.

These challenges exist across the entire value-chain, from inbound logistics through to end-product distribution, including everything from: